Security Vulnerabilities In Programs Research Articles

Directed Dynamic Symbolic Execution for Static Analysis Warnings Confirmation

Currently, there is no doubt among experts in the field of program certification and quality assurance that automated program analysis methods should be used to find bugs that lead to program security vulnerabilities. The national standard for the secure software development requires the use of source code static analysis tools as one of the measures of software quality assurance at the development stage and the application of dynamic analysis and fuzz-testing of the source code at the qualification testing stage. Fundamental limitations of automated program analysis and testing methods make it impossible to carry out simultaneously exhaustive and precise analysis of programs for errors. Thereof, researches are nowadays carried out aimed at reducing the effect of fundamental limitations on the quality and productivity of automated software error detection methods. This paper discusses an approach that combines methods of source code static analysis and dynamic symbolic execution in order to increase the program error detection efficiency.

Mitigating program security vulnerabilities

Programs are implemented in a variety of languages and contain serious vulnerabilities which might be exploited to cause security breaches. These vulnerabilities have been exploited in real life and caused damages to related stakeholders such as program users. As many security vulnerabilities belong to program code, many techniques have been applied to mitigate these vulnerabilities before program deployment. Unfortunately, there is no comprehensive comparative analysis of different vulnerability mitigation works. As a result, there exists an obscure mapping between the techniques, the addressed vulnerabilities, and the limitations of different approaches. This article attempts to address these issues. The work extensively compares and contrasts the existing program security vulnerability mitigation techniques, namely testing, static analysis, and hybrid analysis. We also discuss three other approaches employed to mitigate the most common program security vulnerabilities: secure programming, program transformation, and patching. The survey provides a comprehensive understanding of the current program security vulnerability mitigation approaches and challenges as well as their key characteristics and limitations. Moreover, our discussion highlights the open issues and future research directions in the area of program security vulnerability mitigation.

Binary rewriting and call interception for efficient runtime protection against buffer overflows

Buffer overflow vulnerabilities are one of the most commonly and widely exploited security vulnerabilities in programs. Most existing solutions for avoiding buffer overflows are either inadequate, inefficient or incompatible with existing code. In this paper, we present a novel approach for transparent and efficient runtime protection against buffer overflows. The approach is implemented by two tools: Type Information Extractor and Depositor (TIED) and LibsafePlus. TIED is first used on a binary executable or shared library file to extract type information from the debugging information inserted in the file by the compiler and reinsert it in the file as a data structure available at runtime. LibsafePlus is a shared library that is preloaded when the program is run. LibsafePlus intercepts unsafe C library calls such as strcpy and uses the type information made available by TIED at runtime to determine whether it would be ‘safe’ to carry out the operation. With our simple design we are able to protect most applications with a performance overhead of less than 10%. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.